New TFS Extensibility resources added to VSX site

A question in the MSDN VSX forum prompted me to investigate another area, Team Explorer extensibility, which I am not very familiar with yet. After solving the question, I wanted to learn more about Team Explorer / TFS Extensibility and I found quite a few resources that I didn’t have listed on this VSX site. Some resources that I have updated are:

  • In the Overview page, I have added an image from the MSDN documentation to illustrate the several client models, and clarified that you need the Team Explorer to get the client libraries even if you want a standalone application to connect to TFS.
  • In the Downloads page, I have added the links to download the Team Explorer packages for Visual Studio 2005-2013, which, by the previous paragraph, are required to get the client libraries for standalone applications that don’t extend the Team Explorer. The client model object assemblies and namespaces are quite confusing because some are Microsoft.TeamFoundation.* and some others are Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamFoundation.*, and are located in at least three folders (ReferenceAssemblies\v2.0, ReferenceAssemblies\v4.5, and PrivateAssemblies of the root folder Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio <version>\Common7\IDE). The MSDN documentation for Visual Studio 2012 has a nice mapping between assemblies and namespaces.
  • In the Articles section, I have added a couple of articles to extend the Team Explorer of Visual Studio 2012 / 2013, and an impressive collection of 56 articles about TFS API by MVP fellow Shai Raiten.

In the next posts, I will contribute myself explaining how to get information about the different pages / sections of the Team Explorer.